Jean-Paul Sartre’s failures in Black Orpheus have been widely and rightly explicated by a number of theorists, most notably Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Sartre has rightly been criticized for imposing a white gaze onto his reading of colonized African poetry. It would seem that his work offers us no tools for anti-racist work today. For this article, I read his failures in the text alongside his work in The Imaginary and Being and Nothingness to argue that we can learn from his failures and that his failures do offer us conceptual tools for anti-racist work today. I argue that Sartre’s main contribution ought to be understood as a provocation to white people. He is provoking white people to confront how whiteness works in their imaginary. The imaginary is nothing but what one puts into it, and what one puts into it is imbued with the historical, social and cultural. The image is imbued with the individual’s experiences within a historical, social and cultural situation. If this is the case, then the confrontation with and critique of the image is a political act. In confronting and critiquing the image, one is confronting and critiquing the situation in which the image emerges. The hope is that in doing so, white people could transcend the facticity of their whiteness in particular situations for the better, which in turn would have positive consequences for the larger sociopolitical situation.

让-保罗·萨特在《黑色俄耳甫斯》中的失败已被许多理论家广泛而正确地解释，最著名的是弗朗茨·法农和艾梅·塞塞尔。萨特因对非洲殖民诗歌的阅读施加白色凝视而受到批评，这是正确的。他的工作似乎没有为我们今天的反种族主义工作提供任何工具。在这篇文章中，我阅读了他在文本中的失败以及他在《想象》和《存在与虚无》中的作品争辩说我们可以从他的失败中吸取教训，并且他的失败确实为我们今天的反种族主义工作提供了概念工具。我认为萨特的主要贡献应该被理解为对白人的挑衅。他正在激怒白人去面对白人在他们的想象中是如何运作的。想象无非就是投入的东西，投入的东西充满了历史的、社会的、文化的。图像充满了个人在历史、社会和文化情境中的经历。如果是这样，那么对图像的对抗和批判就是一种政治行为。在面对和批判图像时，人们就是在面对和批判图像出现的情境。希望在这样做的过程中，